I have a new song on repeat these days: “Paper Planes” by MIA (which is apparently on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack – a movie I really want to see). Go listen to it here. The other day, I tried to convince Ishra to create a tribal fusion choreography to it, but she wasn’t keen on all the gunshots. “What is it saying? ‘All I wanna do is [boom boom boom]…’ What kind of a message is that?” she asked.

Those questions hadn’t really occurred to me. I liked the beat, and thought the gun shots and cash register sounds could make for some great isolations and accents. That said, from the very first listening, it made me think of Jodi Bieber‘s work, “Between Dogs and Wolves,” especially images #9 and 10 if you follow that link and scroll through. And those are pretty disturbing, so Ishra probably has a point. Before I saw Bieber’s work, probably a year ago now, I had a pretty naive view of impoverished children in Africa; I thought material wealth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyways, so maybe it wasn’t that bad. When I was in South Africa, I saw poverty for sure, lots of it, but I also saw so much song and laughter that I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad. Bieber’s work forced me to rethink that.

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A tv crew was at the market yesterday. Which has nothing to do with anything, except that I’ve been trying to find a way to work in a quote from ER that’s been haunting me. On Thursday night, I watched a rerun of ER. I gave up on that show a year or two or three ago, not sure why now. But I was restless after my photo class and needed something to watch while I wound down for bed. Anyways, this is the quote:

“When you lose your parents, you’re an orphan. You lose your spouse and you’re a widow. But if when you lose your baby, there is no word.”

And that’s really all I have to say for myself this weekend. Oh – and thanks for voting in my last post! It really helped.